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The brain is incredibly good at math, just the APIs are not exposed.
by fooker 9y ago
The brain is incredibly good at math, just the APIs are not exposed.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- GuiA 9y agoWhat are you basing this claim on?
- Retric 9y agoThe ability to walk without falling over takes a lot of computation, even if it seems effortless.
- GuiA 9y agoSeems like you can easily expand that argument to say that all plants, animals, and even natural processes like crystal formation are good at math.
- tpeo 9y agoWould that be really an issue, though? At least in so far as living macroscopic beings are concerned, they're all doing computation of some sort by processing environmental information and using the results to produce behavior. They're about as good at math as any other computer programmed to reproduce those algorithms. So long as "processing" information isn't the same as actually producing that behavior, as in the case of crystal growth, they're doing something besides what they're doing. Though I'd prefer to think that crystals are actually doing math too, but they're so good they don't even need to think about it. _______________________________________________________ >Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking. >The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease, >Creating, yet not possessing. >Working, yet not taking credit. >Work is done, then forgotten. >Therefore it lasts forever.
- GuiA 9y agoIt is an "issue" in the sense that it raises more questions than it answers. See http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf
- tpeo 9y agoAren't you overshooting what you mean by linking to that paper? Treating some physical processes as computational processes might lead to some intractable problems, but it also might lead so some insights. Aaronson's section on space seems like an example of this. Neither is an issue that some way of thinking might raise more questions than it answers. Actually, if any of those questions is both interesting and solvable, that is a virtue.
- GuiA 9y agoI don't believe I am overshooting. I am pursuing this conversation thread in light of the original claim; that the brain is incredibly good at math. I just wanted to poke at this statement a bit, to show that if you accept this claim (that the brain is "incredibly good at math" based on its inherent structure), it opens the door to a whole other discussion around what constitutes computation. In sum, I was just trying to see through what angle OP was framing their point.
- lomnakkus 9y agoDaniel Dennett has a nice phrase for what plants, etc. do: Competence without comprehension. I think it sort of applies here. (And broadly to a lot of human activities, but I would definitely classify "good at math" as requiring some degree of comprehension whereas limb movement... not so much[1].) [1] You don't really need to understand _how_ you're moving your arm. You just do it -- it's on autopilot.
- skc 9y agoI'm reading Dennet's From Bacteria to Bach and Back right now. Highly recommended if you're interested in philosophical discussions about this sort of stuff. I'm finding it highly entertaining and deliciously provocative.
- chongli 9y agoYeah, think about how complicated it is to play a sport like tennis or frisbee. Running with co-moving objects and players. Integrating the position, velocity, and acceleration of all these things in order to compute a solution. That's some decent undergrad math!
- mentat 9y agoIt doesn't do it by calculating the information though, it uses a set of heuristics learned through consistent experience.
- backtoyoujim 9y agoA top can do the same thing with just a spin.
- snowwrestler 9y agoBut who built and spun it?
- Retric 9y agoWalking usually involves ending up in distant places so you can say get food or something to drink etc. A top generally falls over within a few feet of where it was spun.
- goatlover 9y agoAssuming computation has ontological existence, as opposed to cultural demarcation, where we arrange certain physical devices to have predictable behavior we can modify, and call that computation. Or before computers, denoting the markings human beings make on paper as computation. Saying the brain literally computes is making a philosophical claim as to what exists, as opposed to a useful metaphor.
- lyan 9y agoI don't think it is a mathimatical computation in that way. Let's say you want to press the powerbutton on your pc with your finger. It's not like the brain takes the 3D position in space of your finger and the position of the power button in 3D space and calculates the way it has to move your body/arm etc. to press the button. That would be insane inefficient..
- kazinator 9y agoNo, that would be insanely efficient compared to what it actually does: it infers those 3D positions from real-time 2D image processing.
- eli_gottlieb 9y agoAs a matter of fact, the ability to walk without falling relies on lightly controlling the passive dynamics of the biped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Q2Lx8O6Cg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Q2Lx8O6Cg
- Retric 9y agoPeople don't just deal with nice high friction, level surfaces, without giant gaping holes.
- eli_gottlieb 9y agoI realize. And we have to exercise a lot more control effort on non-nice surfaces!
- snambi 9y agobasic common sense?
- vacri 9y agoTo expand on that point, the brain is not good at simple products of large numbers, but is fantastic at doing things like triangulation. Or calculating how much muscle to contract to keep your balance going into a turn whilst running. Or eyeballing quantities - we notice when we get it wrong, but the vast majority of the time, we're pretty good at getting estimates correct about the human-scale world around us.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoHave you seen that fellow that calls himself a mathemagician, Arthur Benjamin? I believe he would argue it's a matter of training.
- vacri 9y agoWell, yes, but that's not a very useful distinction. You train computers as well by programming them. In meatspace, there was a famous experiment in the '60s where kittens had their heads locked into position so that they only saw vertical lines - their nascent neuroplastic brains then trained that way, and as they matured, they simply couldn't see horizontal lines (eg: would walk into horizontal bars). In the Nature vs Nurture debate, the purists on either side tend to use tortured, hair-splitting definitions to make their arguments, and it's usually those somewhere in the middle that sound the sanest.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoIn which case, computers, as in microprocessors, are extraordinarily bad at math. Without the appropriate programming they can't do anything.
- fooker 9y agoWhat we do regularly (..say.. move your hand to reach something or catch a ball) does take a large amount of very precise products though (i.e. Inverse Kinematics). It is not very meaningful from an information theoretic pov to debate whether the results come from the multiplication algorithms computers follow or via some trained analog network; the result is the same.
- deaddodo 9y agoExactly. I always have to make this clear to people. The conscious mind is incapable of fast arithmetic, but the subconscious mind is amazingly capable. It's doing complex, freebase (relative vs static) calculations constantly. The ability to track and accurately move your limbs with a non-determined base point with a few hundred nanosecond-millesecond latency (proactive) or 150-250ms latency (responsive) is without compare. Just look at machines that don't do precalculated movements (ASIMO, but even many of its patterns are prepared; Boston Dynamics robots, etc) versus those that do (industrial assembly line robots) and it gap is insanely wide. And even then, the dynamic bots are doing maybe one or two things at a time (walk, stop, pickup, walk, drop) nothing complex or integrated.
- pjc50 9y agoIs it? Is there any evidence that it's converting the signals to symbols and performing arithemtic on the symbols? Or is the signal processing being performed "directly", through the essentially analogue operation of the neurons? Otherwise you're asserting "doing arithmetic" as a property of any analogue system, and would say that a falling ball needs to understand calculus in order to make an arc. Downthread someone is saying that crystal formation is "doing arithmetic". While there may be a philosophical sense in saying that all actions of the universe are in some sense arithmetical as they obey physical laws, this is not a useful way to talk. (Repost of my comment above)
- heavenlyblue 9y agoIsn't a computer an essentially analogue operation of transistors restricted to a subset of it's states?
- fooker 9y ago>Or is the signal processing being performed "directly", through the essentially analogue operation of the neurons? You almost described a transistor. :) The physical world, at our scale in inherently analogue. (Might be digital at a quantum level, but we don't know that yet.)
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- agumonkey 9y agoRTFM. /s -- Mother Nature
- mannykannot 9y ago> The brain is incredibly good at math. I agree (though probably not in the sense you intended) - in fact, the human brain is the only thing we know of in the universe that can do math. I do not hold the apparently widespread view that anything performing an action that can be modeled mathematically is doing mathematics, but it is clear by now the two sides on this issue are not going to reach an agreement.